Simon Willison
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Simon Willison community 1mo ago
Quoting Georgi Gerganov
I can 100% attest to the fact that Qwen3.6-27B is a very capable local model for coding tasks. Over the last month and a half I've been using it almost daily, either on my M2 Ultra or on my RTX 5090 box. I use it for small mundane tasks at ggml-org - nothing really impressive,…
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Quoting Matteo Wong, The Atlantic
Katie Moussouris, a cybersecurity expert and the CEO of Luta Security, told me that Anthropic shared with her a copy of the White House’s report on the Fable jailbreak to get her appraisal. (She said that she is not being paid by Anthropic.) The report, Moussouris said, involved…
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Cloudflare CAPTCHA on at least one ampersand
TIL: Cloudflare CAPTCHA on at least one ampersand I'm using Cloudflare's CAPTCHA (they call it a "Web Application Firewall > Custom rules > Managed Challenge" these days) to prevent crawlers from aggresively spidering my faceted search engine on this site, but I got fed up of…
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datasette-apps 0.1a3
Release: datasette-apps 0.1a3 Fixed a bug where users without the create-app permission could still create apps. #27 Fixed a bug where it was impossible to grant permission to edit an app to users who were not the app's owner. The rules for edit/delete are now the same as view:…
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datasette-apps 0.1a2
Release: datasette-apps 0.1a2 Custom network/CSP origins for apps are now guarded by a new apps-set-csp permission, with an optional allowed_csp_origins plugin allow-list for non-privileged users. The Datasette Agent app creation tool enforces the same rules. #24 Stored query…
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datasette-agent 0.3a0
Release: datasette-agent 0.3a0 New tool, execute_write_sql , which requests user approval and then writes to a database - taking user permissions into account. #27 I added a mechanism for asking user approval in datasette agent 0.2a0 . The new execute_write_sql tool can now…
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Quoting Andrew Singleton
Jenny owns a crematorium. John’s propane company gives her a $20 billion investment in return for 5 percent of her operation. Jenny throws $10 billion into the incinerator, then pays John $10 billion to buy propane to burn that money to ashes. John reports that his AI…
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Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
After two days of experience with Claude Fable 5 I think the best way to describe it is relentlessly proactive . It knows a whole lot of tricks and it will deploy pretty much any of them to get to its goal. I'll illustrate this with an example. I was hacking on Datasette Agent…
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datasette 1.0a33
Release: datasette 1.0a33 This alpha is a significant step on the road to a stable 1.0, finally extending the ?_extra= pattern I introduced in Datasette 1.0a3 to cover queries and rows in addition to tables. That pattern is also now documented ! I wrote a whole lot more about…
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asyncinject 0.7
Release: asyncinject 0.7 I built this utility library to support an asyncio dependency injection pattern a few years ago. I was using it with Datasette and Claude Fable 5 spotted some bugs in the dependency which it then fixed for me. It's a very proactive model! Tags: async ,…
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datasette-agent 0.2a0
Release: datasette-agent 0.2a0 Highlights from the release notes: Tools can now ask the user questions mid-execution. Tools that declare a context parameter receive a ToolContext object, and await context.ask_user(...) can ask a yes/no, multiple-choice ( options=[...] ) or…
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DiffusionGemma
DiffusionGemma Last May Google briefly released an experimental Gemini Diffusion model. I tried the preview at the time and recorded it running at 857 tokens/second. It was an exciting model, but Google made no further announcements about it. That research has returned in the…
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Quoting Jeremy Howard
Easy solution to slow down recursive AI self improvement: The lab with the top-ranked model must agree THEY must not use it for working on frontier AI But everyone else should have access to it. By definition, this means the frontier doesn't advance. It also has the critical…
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Initial impressions of Claude Fable 5
I didn't have early access to today's Claude Fable 5 release, but I've spent the past ~5.5 hours putting it through its paces. My initial impressions are that this is something of a beast . It's slow, expensive and has been quite happily churning through everything I've thrown…
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Quoting Andrej Karpathy
I feel a lot of things changing as working software increasingly comes out on a tap. The Jevon's paradox kicks in and I feel my own demand for software growing substantially. You can ask for anything - explainers, visualizers, dashboards, bespoke single-use apps (e.g. a full…
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Siri AI at WWDC 2026
Given how badly burned anyone who took Apple's 2024 WWDC Apple Intelligence announcements at face value was, I'm holding to a strict "I'll believe it when I see it" policy for everything they announced today . The new Siri AI features do at least look feasible with today's…
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datasette-agent-edit 0.1a0
Release: datasette-agent-edit 0.1a0 I'm planning several plugins for Datasette Agent which can make edits to existing pieces of text - things like collaborative Markdown editing, updating large SQL queries, and editing SVG files. Agentic editing of text is a little tricky to get…
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micropython-wasm 0.1a2
Release: micropython-wasm 0.1a2 I added a CLI to micropython-wasm ( issue #7 ), inspired by the first draft of the blog entry when I realized it would be a great way to illustrate the Try it yourself section. Tags: python , sandboxing , webassembly , micropython
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OpenAI Help: Lockdown Mode
OpenAI Help: Lockdown Mode OpenAI first teased this in February , but now it's live and "rolling out to eligible personal accounts, including Free, Go, Plus, and Pro, and self-serve ChatGPT Business accounts": Lockdown Mode is designed to help prevent the final stage of data…
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Quoting Andreas Kling
We will no longer accept public pull requests. [...] A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds. [...] Whether code was typed by hand is beside the point. What matters is who is…
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Quoting Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media
After this story was published Google's spokesperson reached out and asked us to publish a slightly different version of that statement. The new statement no longer stated that "it's critical that we maintain humans in the loop." — Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media , Google…
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Microsoft's new MAI models
Microsoft announced two new text LLMs this morning - MAI-Thinking-1 (reasoning, 35B parameters, available to "select early partners") and MAI-Code-1-Flash (5B parameters, "purpose-built for GitHub Copilot and VS Code to deliver high performance and lower cost [...] rolling out…
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datasette-agent-micropython 0.1a0
Release: datasette-agent-micropython 0.1a0 I want Datasette Agent to be able to generate and execute Python code safely. This alpha is looking promising so far. GPT-5.5 has so far failed to break out of the sandbox! Tags: python , sandboxing , datasette , webassembly ,…
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Pasted File Editor
Tool: Pasted File Editor I really like how you can paste a large volume of text into claude.ai (or the Claude desktop/mobile apps) and it will detect it as a large paste and turn it into a file attachment instead. I decided to have Codex desktop build me a version of that as a…
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May 2026 newsletter
I just sent out the May edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter . If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here . This month: Al got expensive, and Anthropic had a really good month The model releases were a little disappointing…
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datasette 1.0a32
Release: datasette 1.0a32 A minor bugfix release. Fixes a bug with INSERT ... RETURNING queries via the new /db/-/execute-write endpoint and a bunch of base_url issues which showed up when I was experimenting with Service Workers yesterday. Tags: datasette ,…
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Quoting Karen Kwok for Reuters Breakingviews
Anthropic defines “run-rate revenue” in two parts. Use the last 28 days of sales from customers charged on a consumption basis and multiply it by 13. Then, multiply the monthly subscription take by 12, and add the two together. — Karen Kwok for Reuters Breakingviews ,…
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How we contain Claude across products
How we contain Claude across products A complaint I often have about sandboxing products is that they are rarely thoroughly documented , and in the absence of detailed documentation it's hard to know how much I can trust them. Anthropic just published a fantastic overview of how…
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